KerryHaters was first to blog on the Christmas-in-Cambodia lie, way back on May 21. Too bad the elite media hadn't cast their net widely enough. They'd have had a scoop long ago.--Hugh HewittOur friends Pat and Kitty at Kerry Haters deserve the blog equivalent of a Pulitzer for their coverage of Kerry's intricate web of lies regarding Vietnam.--Crush Kerry

"My favorite gun is the M-16 that saved my life and that of my crew in Vietnam," Mr. Kerry told the magazine. "I don't own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle."

Mr. Kerry's campaign would not say what model rifle Mr. Kerry was referring to, where he got it and when, or how many guns he owned. A spokesman for the senator, Michael Meehan, said Mr. Kerry was a registered gun owner in Massachusetts. On Thursday morning, Mr. Meehan said he had not been able to ask Mr. Kerry about the rifle because of Mr. Kerry's hoarse voice; he did not respond to further inquiries.

They were trying to bring back to life the 16 words attack, where they claim that 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union were based on forged documents. You know what's so amusing? This one could have great potential to come back and bite John Kerry on the rear end. As we found out this week, our good friends the French were responsible for the forged documents on Niger, which may or may not be the source of the 16 words. So the good folks that John wants to apologize to are responsible for the fraud.

Airhead America finally made it to Phoenix this week. I know only because The Patriot 960 broadcast the news. They're on 1010 AM but I'm not tempted to listen. My drive time is Laura Ingraham (whom I'm starting to enjoy a lot) and Hugh Hewitt (the program I have to listen to every day). Speaking of Airhead America, or Dead Air America, or Err America, the Leather Penguin has the latest ratings news for Air Idiot in the Big Apple.

Right Thinking Girl (one of those bloggers that I am looking forward to reading at a more leisurely pace after the election) chides Kerry for his expressed disbelief of Prime Minster Allawi's statements about improvements in Iraq. In Bill's World has similar thoughts, expressed succinctly.

Roberto over at Dynamo Buzz has lots of New Jersey news, including this superb post about how disgraced Governor McGreevey could cost Kerry the Garden State's 15 electoral votes. It's not what you think. Great post, Roberto!

The Nudnik File fisks Ryan Lizza's silly article in the New Republic about how Kerry can come back. This is sine wave journalism; the media are desperate to start writing the "Comeback Kerry" stories.

Just when you thought Kerry couldn't possibly be compared to another 1960s TV show character, along comes Cadet Happy with one of his hilarious Photoshop routines. Instant classic!

Remember the Bill Murray film, Groundhog Day, in which a nasty weatherman is forced to relive February 2nd over and over again? John Podhoretz points out that SeeBS News is living its own Groundhog Day.

A Democratic congressman from Louisiana named F. Edward Hebert, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, supplied some footage to Davis and his team of an interview he had filmed with a former Vietnam POW. Davis told Hebert's press secretary "the videotape would be used for a POW special on CBS." Outraged to have been used by CBS to aid its case that the Pentagon was improperly marketing itself, Hebert went on the attack. CBS re-aired the show a few days later with 20 minutes of responses after the airing by Hebert and others--followed by a rebuttal by CBS News president Richard S. Salant, who said pointedly on the air that "no one has refuted the essential accuracy" of the show.

If you want to know where Rather got the idea of saying, "Those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the major thrust of our report," look no further.

Read it all; very interesting piece as it may explain why SeeBS stonewalled so vigorously the first week or so of this scandal.

I haven't read anything by Colbert King before, but I'm very impressed with this article. He starts out with the liberal line:

I had taken to task the authors of the blistering anti-Kerry bestseller "Unfit for Command" for giving readers an unbalanced view of Kerry's service in Vietnam, and for not revealing their own connections with the Bush campaign and the sources of their financial support. The column also criticized "Unfit for Command" for smearing Kerry, a decorated former naval officer, as disloyal because of his antiwar activities. Writing as a former Army officer, I concluded: "Speaking for myself, it is enough that he served."

However, apparently he saw the light after getting lots of emails about the column, especially from Vietnam vets who are liberal themselves.

Coleman, who served in Vietnam for 13 months in 1971-72, wrote that he found disheartening the protracted mudslinging between Bush and Kerry and their respective camps about military records. But the favorable conclusion I drew about Kerry's service was, he stated, "with all due respect, not mine!"

Read it all. It's not every columnist who'd be willing to reexamine an earlier column and conclude that perhaps he was wrong. Yes, he sticks to the party line on the Swiftees, but he's yielding on Kerry's antiwar activities.

Dislogue provides a solid recap of the David Alston case. Alston gave a memorable speech at the Democratic Convention where he vividly described two incidents that proved to him that Kerry was a good leader under fire. The interesting thing about those two incidents was that Kerry was not present at the first and Alston was not present at the second.

I am convinced that Michael Deaver is the invisible hand behind the calculated visuals of the Bush campaign... the trick of forcing photographers to sit close to the stage so that they must shoot sharply upward, showing the candidate from a heroic angle.

"Every American now knows that there's something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was," said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and author of a friendly biography of Mr. Kerry's war years, acknowledging that Mr. Kerry's opponents had succeeded in raising questions about his service.

Brinkley, who probably has more to do with the perception of Kerry as a war hero than anybody other than Jim Rassmann, has dropped the pretense. Amazing!

Update: The Kerry Campaign has come out with a press release claiming that Brinkley didn't mean to say that.

"My comment was meant to be about the political consequences of the anti-Kerry Swift boat attacks vs. the anti-Bush National Guard ones. I was speaking about public perceptions not my personal beliefs."

Nice try, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Brinkley said "Every American now knows... John Kerry was not the hero we thought he was." Unless Brinkley's not an American, or he's got a novel definition of the word "we", I think we can take it as read that Brinkley's abandoned ship.

Kerry Haters reader from Down Under, Grant, forwarded us the link to this amusing satire on Dan Rather. Grant points out that in order to understand the humor, you have to realize that Liberals in Australia are roughly equivalent to Republicans in in the US.

Looking very conspiratorial Rather leaned across his desk and whispered: "I know I can trust a good Aussie Liberal like you, Bunny, so here's the dope." Well after yakking away about long tailed cats, rocking chairs, hogs in a canning factory and something about Texas gophers he finally let out a name. "Sergeant Pepper!"

Definitely worth a read. BTW, do you know the only country to fight side by side with the United States in every war for the last hundred years? It's not the British, and it's certainly not the French. It's the Australians. So if you're quaffing a cold one this weekend, make it a Fosters, in honor of our allies Down Under.

If you don't care about Hollywood, how about Iraq? Kerry gave a tough speech attacking Bush's policies there. Bush fired back, as he had every right to do, and denounced what Kerry said.

"Incredibly," Bush said of his opponent, "he now believes our national security would be stronger with Saddam Hussein in power, not in prison." Then Bush quoted Kerry. "Today he said, and I quote, 'We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.' He's saying he prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy."

Now, to have a Democratic nominee preferring dictatorship to democracy would be big news indeed. But here is a full rendition of the passage from Kerry's speech that Bush partially quoted: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, that was not in and of itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction that we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."

Read the full Kerry quote again. Does that sound like someone who "prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy"? After all, in that same speech Kerry said he "would have tightened the noose and continued to pressure and isolate Saddam Hussein."

Well, now that you mention it, E.J., yes, it does sound like someone who prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security (and chaos) of democracy. Kerry claims "We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." It is hard to read that and not reach the conclusion that Kerry thinks it was a bad trade. If Kerry thinks something was a bad trade, he'd love to reverse the trade, right?

I confess that at times I wonder if I shouldn't be a left-wing blogger. The ones that are at the top, Daily Kos, Atrios, Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum, are extremely unimpressive. Indeed, the only lefty bloggers who seems intelligent are Michael Totten, who supported the Iraq War and has (as far as I know) not made a final decision on whom he's voting for, and Mickey Kaus, who's probably voting for Kerry but does not seem to enjoy the prospect.

Months later, a sympathetic profile in The Worcester Telegram summed up Mr. Kerry's predicament on a day he had been doing errands, ran out of gas, then headed to the car wash. "All of a sudden, water started washing over my shoes!" Mr. Kerry explained in the article. "The car was filling up with water! Water was coming out of every orifice! I could see the headlines: 'John Kerry, Former Congressional Candidate, Drowned in Car Wash.'"

Okay, we know the pattern of Kerry's tall tales by now. Anybody remember an incident like this in a movie or TV sit-com? Because that's where this came from.

That's one thing the two Senators from Massachusetts have in common; they've both been in a car that was filling up with water.

Looks like he knows he's doomed over his part in RatherGate, so Kerry's scuzzy flack Joe Lockhart decided to take a few potshots at our newest ally, Iraqi PM Allawi, before leaving.

"The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips," said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser.

We'll see how long it takes Kerry to disavow those idiotic remarks. It really does seem like those who say the Clintonistas came on board the Kerry campaign in order to sink it once and for all, are 100% correct.

"We know we can't count on the French. We know we can't count on the Russians," said Mr. Kerry. "We know that Iraq is a danger to the United States, and we reserve the right to take pre-emptive action whenever we feel it's in our national interest."

Kerry is to be applauded for approving of the Bush Doctrine in such a forceful manner.

Punchline? Kerry made the statement in 1997, back when Bill Clinton was in office.

I don't know why anybody accuses Kerry of being a flip-flopper. He's really quite consistent. He opposes anything the Republicans want to do and supports anything the Democrats want to do.

Update: Crush Kerry changed their post a bit, which affected the part I quoted, so I have put in a new quote from their site.

The great guys over at Crush Kerry caught Senator Nuance in a stupid statement about how "The War on Terror is as monumental a struggle as the Cold War".

The main problem with Kerry's analysis is that his record shows that he really didn't try to "win" the Cold War, as much as he tried not to make the Soviets mad at us. At nearly every crucial turning point during the Cold War, John Kerry opposed nearly everything that led to our victory in it, which was led of course by the great Ronald Reagan. He should avoid any mention of the Cold War, given that he was on the wrong side of it throughout his career.

They go on to provide a valuable summary of where Kerry actually stood with regard to the Cold War.

I do find it amusing that Kerry now feels quite comfortable using the term "War on Terror". Was it only last March that he said he preferred to call it an "Engagement of Economies"?

John Podhoretz covers the Kerry camp's reaction to the flip-flopping windsurfer ad.

So the Kerry camp is trying to argue with a straight face that because there is horrible news from Iraq, Bush has no right to tease or make fun of Kerry. In this vein, McCurry told reporters, "People do not want to see lighthearted advertising when families are very heavy-hearted about what's happening to their loved ones."

Such a complaint seems to draw a parallel between the campaign hardships of John Kerry and the personal hardships of military families, which is frankly a pretty stupid direction to go in for a struggling presidential campaign.

It seems far more plausible that the heavy-hearted families to whom McCurry is actually alluding bear the surnames Kerry, Heinz and Edwards.

The good news is that this means Kerry can't use a lighthearted or funny ad for the rest of the campaign.

You can read it here. It's entitled "Meeting with the Enemy", regarding Kerry's trip(s) to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese. As with the other chapters released so far, it's carefully researched and footnoted, and will be ignored by the mainstream media.

Send out a little prayer for KH co-blogger Kitty, who's in the hospital for observation. I did a little surfing around for information on her condition, and it does not seem serious, but being in the hospital is never fun and games.

With the scandal at CBS still festering, questions are being raised about whether a felony was committed when the network broadcast apparently forged memos in an attempt to discredit George W. Bush. Yesterday, the chairman of CBS's parent company chose Hong Kong as a place to drop a little bomb. Sumner Redstone, who calls himself a "liberal Democrat," said he's supporting President Bush.

The bloggers who were quick to spot the typographical discrepancies in CBS's tainted documents did their job. But it is only a piece of the larger job, which is to report the news. This is what Rather and CBS did -- not well enough, I grant you. But what animated them was good old-fashioned lust for the scoop. Believe me, those of us who have known such lust know it is blind. Rather would have done the same story on Kerry.

That's just plain silly. Rather could have done any number of stories on Kerry's bizarre war recollections, on Kerry's disturbing sleepwalking incidents, on his Vietnam War protestor days. And yet he hasn't.

WNIS switched Thursday to ABC News, after at least a dozen years with CBS News.

"We had so much outcry from our listeners. They were calling and complaining and saying they wouldn't listen to a CBS newscast anymore," said Lisa Sinclair, general manager of Sinclair Communications, which owns WNIS and four other stations in the Norfolk area, home to the world's largest naval base.

Teh-RAY-Za was in Phoenix today; unfortunately I didn't know about it. And she started babbling:

In regard to the hunt for terror leader Osama Bin Laden, Heinz Kerry said she could see the al-Qaida chief being caught before the November election.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month," said Heinz Kerry, alluding to a possible capture by United States and allied forces before election day.

That's swampland.

The spouse of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry also hit President Bush on Iraq, saying it should not be equated with anti-terrorism efforts and that the current administration chose to create a "hotbed for terrorism" in Iraq when dictator Saddam Hussein did not pose an immediate threat. Heinz Kerry also said she agrees with her husband that a military draft may be reinstated under Bush.

Looks like we were being too kind about Kerry not really saying that he thought the draft might be reinstituted.

(Note: This post will be promoted to the top of the blog periodically throughout the day; scroll down for newer content).

Almost forgot to put up our weekly call for contributions. John Thune is now up three points in South Dakota, but Tom Daschle isn't going to give up easily. I'll put up some more detail after I get to the office, but here's the link to make a contribution to the John Thune for Senate campaign now. I have been advised in comments and emails from our readers that we have raised almost $1,000 for the Thune campaign, which is very gratifying to hear.

Welcome Bar Code King, frequent commenter on KH. He's got an interesting post on Kerry's sudden lost voice (sorry, permalinks appear to be busted) and speculates that it may be the beginning of Nuancy Boy's withdrawal from the race. I don't buy it myself (Kerry's been gearing for this his whole life and is not about to bow out graciously), but it's always fun to speculate.

Update: Apparently the DNC issued their statement after reading the information on the CBS website, so the "sugarcoated" reference may not mean that the DNC had the information before 60 Minutes. Jim Geraghty generously says "Damn, I'm not as dissimilar to Dan Rather as I thought." Well, except that he doesn't decry those who disagree with him as partisans, and insist well after the error is brought to his attention that he has no intention of retracting his statement.

Hat Tip for Update: Chuck aka Phillies Fan (in the comments)

Jim Geraghty always has plenty of good reading, and now he's got hyperlinks! He points out that the RNC has found out that Terry McAwful used the word "sugarcoat" to describe President Bush's performance evaluations back when he was in the Air National Guard before the 60 Minutes Fraud was broadcast. RatherGate gets worse for the Democrats every day.

He also has two instances of Kerry making boneheaded mistakes that could end up costing him.

As I toured other parts of the country, the image that I was prepared for - that of a nation wracked by competing warlords and in danger of degenerating into a Colombia-style narcostate - never materialized. Undeniably, the drug trade is a serious concern (it now compromises about a third of the country's gross domestic product) and the slow pace of disarming the warlords is worrisome.

Over the last three years, however, most of the important militia leaders, like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Uzbek community in the country's north, have shed their battle fatigues for the business attire of the politicians they hope to become. It's also promising that some three million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Kabul, the capital, is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with spectacular traffic jams and booming construction sites. And urban centers around the country are experiencing similar growth.

While two out of three Afghans cited security as their most pressing concern in a poll taken this summer by the International Republican Institute, four out of five respondents also said things are better than they were two years ago. Despite dire predictions from many Westerners, the presidential election, scheduled for Oct. 9, now looks promising. Ten million Afghans have registered to vote, far more than were anticipated, and almost half of those who have signed up are women. Indeed, one of the 18 candidates for president is a woman. Even in Kandahar, more then 60 percent of the population has registered to vote, while 45 percent have registered in Uruzgan Province, the birthplace of Mullah Omar. With these kinds of numbers registering, it seems possible that turnout will be higher than the one-third of eligible voters who have participated in recent American presidential elections.

I don't think the lefty bloggers are going to be covering this article very heavily; after all they've settled on the image of Karzai as the Mayor of Kabul.

Red State has a scoop this morning on the comments by Mary Jane McManus, the wife of a former POW who spent 6 years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, on the candidacy of John Fraud Kerry:

John Kerry and his campaign are not telling the truth about his visits to Paris in the early 1970s. Mr. Kerry's surrogates claims he was seeking a solution to the POW problem, but the exact opposite resulted because of his recklessness. North Vietnamese leaders had said publicly that activity such as Kerry’s encouraged them to prolong the war and keep POWs like my husband captive. It also reinforced the communists’ original claims that they were holding war criminals, which opened them up to trials that would result in execution, prolonged imprisonment or slave labor.

This one will get your blood boiling. Mrs McManus can also be seen in the new documentary, Stolen Honor.

As you know, we here at Kerry Haters are scrupulously fair with Nuancy Boy. Yesterday we ran with an AP story about Kerry pandering to the antiwar crowd with a comment that the Bush Administration plans to bring back the draft. Turns out that the AP may have been trying to "help" Kerry a bit with that article, per Tom Maguire.

Answering a question about the draft that had been posed at a forum with voters, Kerry said: "If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, is it possible? I can't tell you."

Now, it is reported that somebody is flooding college email boxes with scare tactics on the draft, but AP's headline "Kerry: Draft Likely to Return Under Bush" is hardly justified by the comments Kerry made.

Jeffry Gardner points out why Kerry's campaign has come off the tracks. Among the mistakes:

In the few, short weeks since the Republican National Convention, the Kerry campaign has:

Ignored its best Democratic strategist - William Jefferson Clinton - and sought to search and destroy itself over Vietnam. From its mouth-to-mouth effort to raise the dead horse that is the president's National Guard service to its struggle to explain how Kerry could be both a war hero and an antiwar hero, the Kerry campaign has repeatedly dismissed Clinton's advice to move on.

Stayed negative. Kerry's recent heart-freezing speech at the National Guard convention left the room quieter than a fact-checker's office at CBS News. Headlines about his visit to Albuquerque last week didn't sing of his vision for anything, either.

Turned his running mate, John Edwards, into the invisible man. Why has Kerry's team taken its Prince Charming virtually out of the picture? Short answer: Can't have the uninspiring candidate overshadowed.

Of course, we all know why Kerry can't talk to the press: Christmas in Cambodia. But aside from that Gardner really nails it. The Kerry campaign has been thoroughly inept since the Democratic convention. Indeed, they started going off the rails the moment they let Nuancy Boy throw out the opening pitch at the Red Sox-Yankees game.

There's a ton of new content over at Crush Kerry. They didn't like the windsurfer ad as much as we did. They make a good point, that Iraq is too serious an issue to be the subject of goofy ads.

In fairness to ourselves, we here at Kerry Haters don't look at ads dispassionately enough to see whether they will move voters from one side to the other; we just enjoy anything that bashes Kerry sufficiently. So I very much respect Crush Kerry's opinion on this.

They also have the first chapter of Patrick Hynes' chilling novel of the Gore Presidency "At Any Price" up, although I have to admit I was laughing out loud at the description of Gore's efforts to fit in with the schoolchildren, so maybe it's not as much a horror story as it is a tragicomedy. I am enjoying the book so far, mainly because it didn't happen.

BEATING ON DANAS if Dan Rather didn't have enough problems, a new off-Broadway play is dredging up one of the strangest episodes in the CBS anchor's life. Playwright Paul Allman's dark comedy "Kenneth — What Is the Frequency?" is based on the 1986 mystery in which two well-dressed men beat Rather up outside his Upper East Side home while repeating that phrase. (The bizarre beat-down inspired R.E.M.'s song, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?") Fresh from a critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the play debuts here Oct. 21 at 78th Street Theatre Lab.

Uh-oh, Steve Chapman's onto the real story, that Kerry is Karl Rove's puppet. He unearths the secret memo from Rove to Nuancy Boy:

But in all seriousness, let's review some of the tactics we've implemented. They fall into the following categories:

Making Michael Dukakis look good. People thought he looked like a doofus riding in a tank wearing that goofy helmet. But you outdid him when you put on an anti-contamination suit to tour the space shuttle orbiter. You looked like one of those sausages that race around the field at the Milwaukee Brewers' home games. Dukakis would never have let himself be photographed in that outfit--heck, Ben Stiller wouldn't have let himself be photographed in it.

I’ll say it; Dan Rather knew he had forgeries when he ran with the story. He has made no secret that he has been rabidly anti-Bush for years. The fact that Rather and see-BS and the DNC all decided that the forgeries would fly with the public means that they think that the voters are stupid. Think about it: In this reach out and touch y’all technology, how could they have possibly dared to run with the forgeries unless they thought no one was intelligent enough to notice? Thank you, Algore, for inventing the Internet!

Dan Rather: Fairly unbalancedBy Ann CoulterBy now, the only possibilities are: (1) Dan Rather knew he was foisting forgeries on the nation to try to change a presidential election or (2) "Kenneth" inflicted some real brain damage when he hit Rather in the head back in 1986.…
Burkett didn't come to CBS; CBS found Burkett. Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, called Joe Lockhart at the Kerry campaign and told him he needed to talk to Burkett. Lockhart himself is the apotheosis of the media-DNC complex, moving in and out of Democratic campaigns and jobs with the mainstream media, including at ABC, NBC and CNN.
CBS was attempting to manipulate a presidential election in wartime. What if CBS had used better forgeries? What if – like Bush's 30-year-old DUI charge – the media had waited 72 hours before the election to air this character assassination?
There is one reason CBS couldn't wait until just before the election to put these forgeries on the air: It would be too late. Kerry was crashing and burning – because of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

While Bush Inc. is flooding women’s magazines with features in which Laura Bush gets out a family-friendly feminist message, Kerry et al. remain obsessed with sending white men out onto the Sunday talk shows—which women don’t watch. While Bush Inc. understands the power of the vivid visual image—dressing the entire GOP convention, for instance, in matching tangerine and turquoise, color-coordinating the Cheney grandchildren to give a visual sense of order and unity—the Democrats keep being bumped to the inside pages because they send out their candidate and his wife in neutrals. I am convinced that Michael Deaver is the invisible hand behind the calculated visuals of the Bush campaign—the signature use of deep, majestic backdrops behind the candidate, the use of jewel tones on Laura Bush and other women associated with the administration, the trick of forcing photographers to sit close to the stage so that they must shoot sharply upward, showing the candidate from a heroic angle. By contrast, the Democrats ignore them, losing women, who are simply too busy racing to get school lunches ready and kids out the door to get their impressions about the candidates from Meet the Press.

That explains the memo from the RNC telling everybody to wear matching tangerine and turquoise outfits at the convention. And of course, women are too busy getting school lunches ready and kids out the door to watch Meet the Press (on Sunday morning).

Dick Morris has a great idea, now that Kerry has decided to move towards the antiwar position on Iraq.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has opened the door for this new Bush offensive by declaring the invasion of Iraq "illegal" and equating the deadly terror raids by Iraqi guerillas with the embarrassing but hardly lethal sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. military. With those incendiary claims put into play, it is now legitimate for Bush to attack the secretary-general and ask his opponent to take a stand for or against Annan's remarks.

We are pleased to welcome the L-Dotters blog, aka the Pajama Pack, run by longtime L-Dotter Ms Falconer's Cabana Boy. If you don't know what L-Dotters are, they are registered users of Lucianne.com, in my opinion the finest and most amazing group blog in existence. Both Kitty and I have been long-time L-Dotters, as has Ms Falconer's Cabana Boy--there are some names you just don't forget :).

Our friend Chris at Kerry Waffles has a new email indicating the Heinz Family Philanthropies are setting up a puff piece in Good Housekeeping, possibily on Kerry, possibily on his wife. This appears to be a different piece than the dueling Bush/Kerry article on the women in their lives which appeared in the October issue.

There are a couple of reasons why we want to get on the record with this story now that I can't share as yet. Stay tuned for further developments....

Dale's Electoral College Breakdown now shows President Bush with 118 safe electoral votes in 14 states. John Kerry has 19 safe electoral college votes in two states and the District of Columbia. Adding in all the slight edges, President Bush would win 312-221 (with West Virginia a toss-up). Among the states credited to Bush in this analysis, only in one state (Pennsylvania) was the most recent poll favoring Kerry, by one point. On the Kerry side of the ledger, New Jersey is tick-tight as Dan Rather would say, Oregon last polled Bush +4, and New Hampshire has two contradictory polls on the same day, one showing Bush up 9 and one showing Kerry up 6.

As always when discussing the IEM, I warn that the values shown on the various contracts reflect the current Conventional Wisdom; if the CW changes tomorrow, so will the contract values.

That said, Kerry Preferred is falling off a cliff in the minds of the IEM participants, as a look at this graph reveals. Don't worry about the asterisk; all the IEM did was break the chances for each outcome in two parts: if the winner gets over 52% of the popular vote, or under 52%.

If you recall, USA Today got six memos from Bill Burkett, but Dan Rather only used four in his 60 Minutes-torching broadcast. Our buddy Bill at In Bill's World has located the two missing memos and posted them on his blog.

Let's see where this story goes; it is safe to guess that it will not be the subject of a 60 Minutes II piece with Dan Rather reporting.

A South Korean embassy official who met with John Kerry fund-raisers to talk about creating a political group for Korean-Americans was in fact a spy for his country, raising concerns among U.S. officials that he or Seoul may have tried to influence the fall presidential election.

John Kerry feels one, but I think it's just a cold wind over his chances of being elected President.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, citing the war in Iraq and other trouble spots in the world, raised the possibility Wednesday that a military draft could be reinstated if voters re-elect President Bush.

This is amusing because the only people calling for the resumption of a draft are Democrats like Charles Rangel, who hope that a draft would bring about a return of the college antiwar protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Note that all the co-sponsors are from the Democratic Kook Caucus including Sheila Jackson-Lee, Mesopotamia Jim McDermott and Jim (Jew-baiter) Moran.

I can't help but notice that Kerry hasn't changed his tune in over thirty-three years. From his halcyon days at Yale, giving interviews to the Harvard Crimson, where he distrusted the military and wanted to dispatch our armed forces only under the direction of the United Nations to Winter Soldier, where he argued that our soldiers were committing atrocities on daily basis, but it wasn't really their fault.

And indeed, as we pointed out the other day, Kerry would happily abandon the Iraqis to the same fate that befell the South Vietnamese thirty years ago. One of the common refrains I have been struck with in reading the comments from US soldiers who served in Vietnam was their concern for their South Vietnamese counterparts. We tend not to think about this because the media are stressing all the bad news and the Iraqis who want us out. But what will happen if we do "bug out" in Iraq? My guess is that the people who have been cooperating with us will likely be tortured, raped and/or executed. Think of that the next time somebody starts moaning about the 1,000 US dead or the cost of the war.

Hat Tip: Bill at In Bill's World, who is also pulling guest-posting duties over at the Mudville Gazette himself while Greyhawk is over in the sandbox. Congrats, Bill, there is no doubt being a guest blogger over there is quite an honor, and well-deserved!

Chris at Kerry Waffles takes a look at Kerry's buddies overseas. On a related note, Chris has also put up a page on "Cash & Kerry". As always, Chris has music, funny photos and several articles on the theme on his pages. Great job as usual, Chris!

So folks, there are always going to be things we could have done better or problems for people to complain about, but I'm confident that we're doing the right thing, for the right reasons, at the right time in Iraq and I am proud of how George Bush and our troops in Iraq have handled this tough situation.

The Ohio Poll, conducted by the University of Cincinnati, shows that 54 percent of Ohio's likely voters support Bush and 43 percent support Kerry; independent candidate Ralph Nader has 2 percent support. And just 1 percent of Ohio voters say they are still undecided, according to the poll, which has a 4.6 percent margin of error.

Back in Kerry-land, the Detroit meet - most recently scheduled for Friday - is off. Why? Officially, it's scheduling. Unofficially, it's politics. If you're going to have Dingell, the Kerry campaign reasoned, we should have Gov. Jennifer Granholm, whose husband is co-chairing the Kerry campaign in Michigan. And Michigan's two senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow.

When the automakers, particularly GM, balked at what started to look more like political grandstanding than a business meeting, the Kerry campaign bailed. Isn't Michigan a battleground and isn't the auto industry the biggest thing in it? Chalk this up as another missed opportunity for Kerry, who needs to widen his appeal in the industrial heartland.

Mr. Rather's admission of a "mistake in judgment" and subsequent on-air "I'm sorry" do not repair the credibility damage. He should take this opportunity to cut his losses and retire. CBS should clean house in its production department. Producer Mary Mapes should be the first to go. She not only got snookered along with Mr. Rather, she allegedly put Mr. Burkett in touch with a senior official in Sen. John Kerry's camp, reportedly in exchange for the memos. The Kerry campaign confirms the conversation, but denies that the Bush service record was discussed. Still, it looks bad. A journalist has no business making such connections.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in a snarky editorial that manages to bash Bush a few times, puts it more as a friendly suggestion:

Mr. Rather needs to do more than offer a sincere apology. At 72, he is at an age when he could honorably retire. If he were to do it now, he would show that responsibility was more than a word expressed with an anchorman's faux sincerity.

The Weekly Standard has a long article on the Daschle-Thune battle for the Senate.

Indeed, the biggest problem John Thune faces is the change in South Dakota. Nothing happens in the state anymore without federal funding. The pioneers and cowhands who once shocked Teddy Roosevelt with their freedom and independence have become something like servants--inhabitants of a place that seems to survive only because tourists bring in outside dollars when they visit the Black Hills and the state's senators bring home money from Washington. If Daschle's positions on abortion or gun control differ from those of his constituents, if he lives a high-celebrity life in Washington while posing as a populist at home, what's that compared with a federal-pork power that John Thune will need 10 or 20 years in the Senate to match?

Any hopes that we had that Thune would win easily were erased by this article. Thune can win, but it's going to be a tough battle. We support the Thune campaign here at KH and will have more on this struggle tomorrow.

Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign fired back hard at the White House yesterday, saying President Bush was using the CBS documents scandal as a ``gutless political attack'' and smokescreen to duck questions about Bush's National Guard service.

``You have to question the motives of the people who are asking these questions,'' senior Kerry campaign adviser Joe Lockhart said. ``The White House is raising questions about this because they don't want to answer questions.''

Of course, and we have to question the motives of Joe Lockhart, who's up to his neck in RatherGate himself.

More important, Kerry is refusing himself to answer any more questions about Vietnam. One would think that simple consistency would require that the Democrats start to shut up about what somebody else was doing back then. Indeed this gives reporters an excuse to hammer Kerry on Christmas in Cambodia, the magic hat, the breech-birth delivery, and all sorts of fanciful tales that Kerry has told about his service.

In an interview Monday evening, a repentant Rather conceded it had been a mistake to broadcast the documents. But even though he could not vouch for their authenticity, he said he still did not believe that they were fakes.

"Do I think they're forged? No," Rather said. "But it's not good enough to use the documents on the air if we can't vouch for them, and we can't vouch for them."

For the "good" affiliates, the ones who have written regretful and appropriate responses to viewers' e-mails, we are regretful. We have no choice but to conclude that these affiliates' have made appropriate efforts that have garnered no real results. There is not much point in watching a channel where the network executives are arrogant and the affiliates are voiceless.

For the "bad" affiliates, who have ignored the first round of e-mails, our tone must be clear about the consequences. Viewership will cease. Local advertisers will be contacted, and complaints about their choice in advertising venues will be registered. We will deride, mock, and insult them to our friends and neighbors. Their company's reputation will be akin to Hustler magazine, the Union Carbide corporation, the Saudi Royal Family, or Halliburton — whichever villain you choose.

William Safire says we need to find the forger. He also spells out the law:

Whoever, having devised any scheme or artifice to defraud transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. " U.S. Criminal Code, Chapter 63, Section 1343.

Consider what would have happened if, instead of Rather and CBS, the offenders were Brit Hume and Fox News?

Rather received 12 days' grace before he delivered an apology. His problem was not blamed on his politics, but on a lapse of professional judgment, going with one source while ignoring those who questioned the veracity of the documents.

Yet if Hume were the offender, would his professional judgment be questioned? Or would his politics be condemned?

The most vulnerable employee at CBS would seem to be Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, who not only obtained the discredited documents but also put her source, former National Guardsman Bill Burkett, in touch with Joe Lockhart, senior adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign. But it remains unclear whether senior executives from Heyward on down, who approved the story, could also be in jeopardy, and how the network will deal with some critics' calls to oust Rather, whose contract has two more years to run.

Rather's obstinate refusal for almost two weeks to even consider the possibility that the memos were fake, and his insistence that President Bush "answer the questions" means that he has to go. I've already programmed my TV to skip over my local CBS affiliate when surfing the channels.

Kerrynomics: An Agenda for CalamityBy Ralph R. ReilandWithout the small business sector of the economy, America would be flat on its back -- economically, politically, and militarily. And presidential hopeful John Kerry has consistently taken positions over the past decade that are a direct threat to the strength and survival of entrepreneurial activity and small businesses in this country.…
In its latest survey, the Small Business Administration reports that small businesses make up more than 99.7 percent of all employers in the United States and create 75 percent of the net new jobs in the American economy. In short, we're not talking about the financial interests of just some small business owners -- we're talking about the backbone of the American economy and the bulk of the nation's jobs and paychecks.

Dan's in a bind; he's still insisting that the memos are not forgeries! I think he should plead senility.IT IS WATERGATEBy ERIC FETTMANNLAST week, as the furor over Dan Rather's National Guard memos grew more and more intense, media critic Ken Auletta, appearing on PBS, criticized Fox News Channel for having "treated this story as if it were Watergate. It's not Watergate."
Actually, in many respects, it is indeed broadcast journalism's Watergate.
…
Which is why it's especially significant that Rather admitted Tuesday night that CBS approached Burkett — whom the anchor admits was well-known for having tried repeatedly over the years to discredit George W. Bush — for the documents after a five-year search.
In other words, the documents didn't just fall into CBS' lap: The network went looking for them, and approached a source whose hatred for the president was well known.…
Rather yesterday told The Chicago Tribune he still doesn't think they were forgeries.

While decrying the negative advertising in today's politics, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times smears the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

What I found most dispiriting over the last month of politicking was the sight of two senior statesmen in the Republican Party - yes, I mean you, George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole - climbing on the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth bandwagon in its campaign to turn Mr. Kerry from war hero to craven braggart.

Of course Mr Kristof found that dispiriting largely because it showed that the Swiftees have legitimate beefs, while the Times wants to continue to pretend that their allegations have been proven false. If his gripe is with supposedly respectable people embracing unrespectable people, then why doesn't he mention the Democrats' embrace of Bill Burkett's charges, or Daschle's literal embrace of Michael Moore, or the entire Democratic Party's involvement with the Move-On herd?

That's not a problem just for Mr. Kerry, but for the integrity of our political process. As I wrote in my last column, a careful look at Mr. Kerry's war record suggests that he stretched the truth here and there, but he served with immense courage - and he deserved all his medals.

That is far from proven, except in Kristof's little mind.

Update: Tom Maguire takes a longer look at this column. I particularly liked the reader comment that after urging each side to police their own, Kristof spends the bulk of his column policing the other side.

Aw Cripes, Not This Zogby Poll Crap Again!The press is all atwitter at the latest Zogby poll showing a "dead heat". For God's sakes how often do we have to go through this! It's a FREAKING INTERNET poll that is out of whack with just about nearly every other poll. Pay no attention to it.

There's a very good reason why people joke about seeing John Edwards on milk cartons.Gone MissingBy William TuckerConventional wisdom says that even the best vice-presidential candidate can do little to help the top of the ticket. In this case the convention wisdom may be right.
But that's not the half of it. The fact is that, far from the claustrophobic confines of the loyal Democratic base, Edwards' message resonates very little. Winning elections, it turns out, is not the same as swaying juries.

The defects in Sen. John Kerry’s campaign do not all stem from a candidate and advisers who don’t know where they are going. A large part of the most directionless challenge to an incumbency in recent decades comes from the fundamental disagreement that Kerry voters have among themselves.

That's a big part of the problem, no doubt. Another is the fact that Kerry must appeal to swing voters by lying, while keeping his base happy. So far, he has been unable to square that circle.

If you listened to my segment of the Digital Brownshirts News, I said near the very end:

Now that we know where the documents were faxed from, I wonder if the more interesting question isn’t where they were faxed to. If they weren’t faxed directly to CBS News, this story could get a whole lot more interesting.

Hindrocket of the Power Line Blog on TV Monday night:

Mr. HINDERAKER: Well, let me tell you that there is another mystery that I think is more of a mystery than that, and that is: Was Mr. Burkett...

BORGER: OK.

Mr. HINDERAKER: ...the last person to have these documents before they went to CBS?

If our military action against Iraq was and is a mistake, Senator, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die (in Iraq) for a mistake? Why not withdraw our troops in four months? Better yet, four weeks? Four days? Four hours?

The story is the same in battleground states all over the country: Lawyers are girding for battle, studying the fine print of election law, prepping to swoop in for their candidate. No one wants a repeat of the chads that hung up the nation four years ago--but if this election is close, things could be even worse this November. So many potential problems loom that a close election could make the Florida fiasco in 2000 seem like the good old days.

Our buddy Chris at Kerry Waffles alerted us to this story yesterday. Wendy York, the judge who originally removed Nader from the ballot, recused herself after it was discovered she had contributed $1,000 to the Kerry campaign. Now a second judge has ruled against Nader, and, surprise, surprise, surprise, this one donated $250 to the Democratic Senatoria Campaign Committee. We'll see if this judge buckles as well.

Expect that hardy perennial meme on the left to start popping up again now that it looks like Kerry's circling the toilet. Law professor Paul Campos kicks it off in the Rocky Mountain News. Check this out:

Voters are remarkably bad at calculating their own self-interest, even when their self-interest and their political beliefs coincide. Bartels gives the following example. Only the richest 2 percent of Americans pay estate taxes. Yet among people who believe that the rich ought to pay more taxes, and who also believe that growing income inequality is a bad thing, two-thirds also favor repeal of the estate tax!

Of course, my reading of that is that those who believe that the rich ought to pay more taxes and who also believe that growing income inequality is a bad thing, are idiots. And there are some things so dumb only a law/political science professor could believe them:

According to Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, millions of voters in the 2000 presidential election based their votes on what the weather had been like lately.

Bill's got a solid post on Jean Kerree's retreat and defeat plan for Iraq. Kerry had a major role in destroying South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos back in the 1970s, now he wants to do the same to the Middle East. Also, I should have linked to this post from Bill earlier, which expresses a healthy skepticism about Kerry's ability to manage Iraq.

We're pleased to welcome Cactus Road, a blog that could also fit in the Arizona Alliance. Bill's got a smooth writing style and a good sense of humor, as you can tell from this post. He also seems to have gotten down the late-night blogging trick.

Here's a good first person article on why sons and daughters of those killed in Vietnam are unlikely to be voting for Le Fraude.

I don't blame Kerry for my father's death, and I don't much care if he shamelessly chased after medals. But I do care that when he returned from Vietnam he gave aid and comfort to the enemy while our soldiers were still dying. I care that he smeared my father and a generation of our armed forces with false charges of war crimes while posing himself as a hero. I care that Kerry's false charges encouraged our enemy who was pressuring our POWs in inhumane ways to confess to imaginary war crimes. I care that he went to Paris to meet with the Viet Cong in 1970 while still an officer in the Navy Reserve, returning to publicly advocate for their position and against America's position.

The polls are wrong. They are all over the map like diarrhea. On Friday, one poll had Bush 13 points ahead -- and another poll had them both tied. There are three reasons why the polls are b.s.: One, they are polling "likely voters." "Likely" means those who have consistently voted in the past few elections. So that cuts out young people who are voting for the first time and a ton of non-voters who are definitely going to vote in THIS election. Second, they are not polling people who use their cell phone as their primary phone. Again, that means they are not talking to young people. Finally, most of the polls are weighted with too many Republicans, as pollster John Zogby revealed last week. You are being snookered if you believe any of these polls.

You know the fat lady is moving towards the front of the stage for her big solo. Jake writes a pretty funny article pointing out that Kerry has taken off the gloves more times than the Yankees' outfield in an extra-inning game.

USA Today has a long article about Burkett and his supposed source for the documents. The story sounds very, very weird.

At one point Thursday, as he spoke on a cell phone to his San Antonio lawyer, David Van Os, Burkett's voice froze in midsentence and his body convulsed in a violent seizure. He was helped to the floor and then to a couch. He has had such bouts sporadically over the past several months, but this one was worse, his wife said.

Scarier than Dean R. Koontz, more fearsome than Stephen King, guaranteed to give you more goosebumps than R.L. Stine, it's... Patrick Hynes of Crush Kerry! Patrick starts to release his novel on the Crush Kerry website, and its blood-curdling premise is that Gore is handed the 2000 election by the Florida Supreme Court, as the US Supreme Court declines to intervene.

President Algore

I've only read the prelude so far, but it looks like this will be giving a lot of people sleepless nights.

Citizens’ ArrestBy Patrick O’HanniganIn 1998, retired Special Forces operators forced CNN to apologize for a story alleging that American troops had used nerve gas in Laos during a secret 1970 mission called Operation Tailwind. Although Special Forces alumni responding to the story used Web-based technologies to communicate with each other and with CNN, blogs did not then exist. Slandered veterans could not talk with each other in real time, or expect help from anyone outside their own circles. Nevertheless, these experts in "force multiplication" succeeded in getting the story's producer sacked.
One year later, Pyra Labs added Blogger software to the collection of Internet tools already on the market. Blogger leveraged the increasing popularity of all things Web to make "asymmetrical warfare" by non-journalists against inaccuracies in Big Media easier than it had been before. Its debut set in motion a chain of events that would eventually cause CBS News and its iconic anchorman to come belatedly to grips with the idea that their own credibility had gone the way of Jonathan Livingston Seagull: lost in a painted sky, where the clouds are hung for the poet's eye, and the breaking news bites the network guy.
…
Many recent stories about the impact of blogs on RatherGate have been grudging in their admiration and fearful of what can happen when the unwashed masses at computers in their pajamas dispense with the checks and balances that brick-and-mortar newsrooms are supposed to have. Careless talk about how bloggers edit themselves contributes to this fear. In fact, bloggers don't edit themselves; they edit each other -- and that's even better.
…
Fortunately, the blogosphere is now a force to be reckoned with.

By Jed BabbinThe four-point plan for Iraq John Kerry outlined in his Monday speech is a concatenation of wishful thinking, defeatism, and moral obtuseness. And -- most importantly -- Mr. Kerry's goal is one to bring our troops home, not to win. His only idea is to talk the U.N. and NATO into taking the whole mess off our hands so we can withdraw our troops.…
Mr. Kerry wants to withdraw, whether we win or not. He wants to bring our troops home. No one wants our troops to be there, but many -- fortunately including Mr. Bush -- think they need to stay there until the job is over.
Mr. Kerry doesn't give a damn about fighting and winning. There are many things that disqualify Mr. Kerry from the high office he seeks. This, though, is preeminent among them. Do we want a commander in chief who isn't capable of seeing a war through to victory?

Democrat John Kerry joked Monday on "The Late Show with David Letterman" about changes under President Bush's tax plan, including that Vice President Dick Cheney can claim the president as a dependent.
…
During Kerry's trip to New York, he also delivered a speech laying out his vision for Iraq and raised $4 million at reception and dinner benefiting the Democratic National Committee.
He planned another television appearance Tuesday morning -- on "Live with Regis and Kelly."

President Bush will go before the United Nations today and explain his vision for enhancing security and fostering peace in the post-9/11 world.
Count on this: Bush's words will stand in stark contrast to the defeatist, intemperate, despicable language used yesterday by his opponent, Sen. John Kerry.Kerry seems to think America has already lost the war in Iraq. And maybe the War on Terror, too.

David Brooks points out that Kerry's speech yesterday on Iraq may have contradicted past Kerry utterances, but at least the New-Wonk of Nuance has drawn a sharp contrast with President Bush's policy. The good news is that now we can finally have the debate on Iraq that the Democrats claimed to want; the bad news for Kerry and the Iraqi people is that Kerry has aligned himself with the cut and run crowd.

By picking the withdrawal camp, he has assigned himself a clear task. Right now 54 percent of likely voters believe that the U.S. should stay as long as it takes to rebuild Iraq, while 39 percent believe that we should leave as soon as possible. Between now and Nov. 2, Kerry must flip those numbers.

Substantively, of course, Kerry's speech is completely irresponsible. In the first place, there is a 99 percent chance that other nations will not contribute enough troops to significantly decrease the U.S. burden in Iraq. In that case, John Kerry has no Iraq policy. The promise to bring some troops home by summer will be exposed as a Disneyesque fantasy.

Ah, but isn't Kerry's entire life a Disneyesque fantasy, from his reverse Cinderella marriages to his flying dog, to his Pollyana-ish belief in the goodness of the French, to his Buzz Lightyear career aboard a Swift boat?

Our buddy Mike Gallaugher at the Christian Conservative Blog has an excellent backgrounder on North Korea. Not surprisingly, Mike scrutinizes religious freedom or lack of it in that repressive state, but he also covers the history of the country, its nuclear program, and human rights abuses. Superb work by a great blogger.

(Thanks to the great guys over at Crush Kerry for linking this post. Please feel free to leave a comment and/or browse around--we have over 2500 anti-John Kerry posts. Also, check out our sister/brother blogs, Kitty Litter and Brainster's.)

I've never seen anything like this. Kerry set off on his Swift boat memories and chugged right into the perfect storm in August. It was a thorough disaster of a month for Kerry with zero bounce coming out of his convention, then the whammy of the first Swift boat ad, then the first released chapter of Unfit for Command, including Christmas in Cambodia, which resulted in Kerry going into deep seclusion. Then John Edwards, muffled since his disastrous "Just spend three minutes with the men who served with him" comment at the DNC pops up to say that Iran should be allowed to have nuclear power plants. Kerry must have breathed a sigh of relief when the Republicans finally held their convention at the end of the month. Unfortunately for him, President Bush got a chance to reintroduce himself at his convention with the aid of popular Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Democrats like Ed Koch and Ron Silver and Zell Miller also spoke up for him at the convention.

Still Kerry had apparently weathered a terrible month as the polls right up until the President's speech at the RNC showed only a mild swing to the Republicans. But when Bush was through, so apparently was Kerry. So September started badly, but it got worse with the ridiculous attempt by the SeeBS News to smear President Bush over his National Guard Service. As I pointed out at the time, this was a doomed effort from the beginning even if the memos had been true.

The only group the National Guard story could have hurt were SeeBS and the Kerry campaign, and so, almost inevitably it happened. SeeBS could recover with time, but the Kerry campaign doesn't have time. He's not going to make the October charge to keep the race interesting. He's blown his last chance, especially with this new strategy of attack, which is not going to work with the moderates.

The irony is that with all the Nixonian aspects to Kerry, he's going to get beaten like McGovern.

Those of you who listened to my segment of the Digital Brownshirts News may have gotten a scoop near the end:

Now that we know where the documents were faxed from, I wonder if the more interesting question isn’t where they were faxed to. If they weren’t faxed directly to CBS News, this story could get a whole lot more interesting.

Well, the story has gotten a whole lot more interesting, but the document trail is not yet clear. The interesting thing is that CBS producer Mary Mapes appears to have called Joe Lockhart of the Kerry Campaign and told him to call Burkett.

Now this raises major red flags. CBS had not yet run their story:

Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a producer talked to him about the 60 Minutes program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8.

So why in the world is CBS' producer tipping the DNC off to this story? That's not too hard to figure out. So they could coordinate their attacks on the President. Gee, is there something wrong with that?

CBS has burned its bridges with me. It's not too hard to program the TV to skip over that channel as if it weren't there.

Chris at Kerry Waffles just sent me this story; apparently it's causing a lot of controversy in New Mexico (which has a very substantial Green Party, perhaps the largest in comparison to the general population of any state).

Judge Wendy York ruled Friday that Nader didn't qualify as an independent candidate in New Mexico because he was running as the nominee for minor parties in other states, including the Reform Party.

I couldn't get through to Open Secrets myself, but Chris tells me he checked and Wendy York is shown as having donated $1,000 to John Kerry's campaign:

Hugh Hewitt had Jim Geraghty on the phone, who turned up his TV so we could hear Rather talking about RatherGate. Rather said they got the memos from Bill Burkett, but specified that Burkett did not contact CBS, CBS contacted Burkett. Obvious question for Rather: Who suggested that you contact Burkett?

"Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president."--John F. Kerry, December 2003.

"The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."--John F. Kerry September 2004.

Either Kerry's flipped on whether we are safer/more secure, or he's admitting that he doesn't have the judgment or credibility to be President.

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where-if I knew then what I know now-I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

Your source misled you, eh Dan? All together now:

"Who was your source?"

Update: CBS has acknowledged that they got the memos from Bill Burkett, but there is an interesting detail in that acknowledgement:

In a statement, CBS said former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett "has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents" and "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."